The book, more-or-less A5 sized and in hard-covers, has a mix of black-and-white and colour photos, the latter with that particular gaudiness that makes food look faintly obscene in any book published before about, say, 1990. If you follow @70s_party on Twitter you’ll know what we mean although it must be said nothing in the Guinness book is as fundamentally horrifying as most of the excessively ‘creative’ recipes presented there.

It begins with a few double-page spreads like this one:

That’s interesting because it summarises where things were at in 1961: food definitely wasn’t the norm and people needed convincing, ideally with a bit of what we assume passed for female-friendly eye candy back then.

Though there had been pub food before the 1960s (see the forthcoming Big Project for more on that) it was in this decade that it really took off, and Guinness got stuck in.

The story is told in the Spring 1963 edition of the in-house magazine, Guinness Time, and also in a short essay by Edward Guinness in The Guinness book of Guinness, 1988, neither of which can be considered entirely objective. Anyway, here’s how it went.

In partnership with the National Trade Development Association, in November 1961, the brewery published a book called The Guide to Profitable Snacks (many copies are available on Amazon/Ebay — we’ve got one on the way). It contained recipes and costings for bar snacks in an attempt to address a specific problem whereby, as Edward Guinness put it

many ladies started [providing food] with enthusiasm but were disappointed by the lack of return either due to inexperience in providing what the customers wanted or more often as she had no idea how to cost the operation and fix the appropriate retail price.

In 1962 Guinness followed that book up with a film, Food for Thought, which is sadly not available anywhere online, starring Pearl Hackney and Carry On star Eric Barker. (You’ll know him when you see him.)

These were successful enough but Edward Guinness felt that face-to-face demonstrations would be even better so, in October 1962, the newly-formed Snack Demonstration Team hit the road in this fabulous Mystery-Machine-alike:

Four days a week for the latter part of that year, lecturer Jo Shellard (an actor turned caterer) and his assistant Clint Antell toured the North West of England (where pub food was particularly wanting, we assume) speaking to groups of publicans ‘and their wives’:

The van contains the full equipment for showing the film-strip, tables, cutlery, cookers and other items necessary for the demonstration. it also contains sets of the basic snack equipment required by licensees, priced from £5 per set upwards. In addition, the van carries supplies of the book… and notebooks for each member of the audience, containing a précis of the lecture, recipes, and space for the licensees’ own notes.

The talks got busier and busier and Edward Guinness reckoned that, by the time the GSDU was demobilised in 1966, more than 20,000 people had attended its lectures. One licensee in Blackburn, he said, told him that he’d doubled his lunchtime takings by offering soup and a ploughman’s and thus luring local workers from the factory canteen. By this time, most big breweries had a catering training division, so Guinness’s work was done.

The motive for all this was never quite selfless — ‘Guinness prospered if the trade prospered’ — but ads like this from a few years later make you wonder if they didn’t also take the chance to push Guinness more directly, as the classy choice to accompany meals:

From 1966. SOURCE: Illustrated London News.

We wonder if there’s anyone out there who remembers attending one of Jo Shellard’s demos — they’d have to be at least in their 70s if so. When the book arrives, we’ll let you know what recipes it contains, and how closely it resembles the pub grub cliches we know and love.

Here’s the best of the beer- and pub-related writing that’s caught our attention in the last week, from Canadian IPA to sour celebrity-endorsed Guinness.

Biéres de garde are often grouped with saisons under the banner of ‘farmhouse ales’… [but] whilst the saison booms, its French cousin generates far less interest. This is understandable, in a way — if the dry, peppery quality of a saison in the Dupont vein invites dry hopping, mixed fermentation and other ‘crafty’ goings on, the soft, sweet, malty character of many biéres de garde hardly screams experimentation.

[These] yeasts are extremely diverse, and that the yeasts don’t cluster by what region they came from. A Finnish yeast sits in between the Lithuanian ones, and some Lithuanian ones are closer to some Norwegian ones than to the others. Even within Norway the geographical relationships don’t hold. Stranda, furthest north, is the most similar to a yeast from Voss, furthest south.

When I was a student at the University of King’s College in Halifax, we happily cradled sloshing pitchers of Alexander Keith’s IPA without a thought of hop characteristics in our heads… In Halifax, you can’t go far without having a Keith’s thrust upon you- it’s the province’s favourite sup and was heavily marketed under the slogan ‘those who like it, like it a lot’ throughout the summit of its popularity in the 90s.

Here’s an explanation for the rise in popularity of cold beer, especially lager, that we’ve not come across before: pubs got hot.

Why did Guinness equate room temperature with 57 to 63 degrees Fahrenheit [13-17ºc] when it was obvious that the room temperature of pubs… could be higher than that?… I requested that Benson’s various resources go into action. We had long held the Blue-Band Margarine account, and that gave us a view on desirable room temperatures. I also asked the Brewers’ Society how many pubs had installed central heating… The answers were revealing. The room temperature of Public Houses had risen by at least 10% over the previous few years while the preferred ambient temperature of everything from Coca-Cola to canned beer in the home had gone down…

That’s from ‘Cool Guinness’, a short article by advertising man Brendan Nolan published in The Guinness Book of Guinness in 1988.

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We’re Boak and Bailey

We're geeks in general, but especially about beer and pubs. We write under the names Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey. We live in Cornwall in the UK. We've been blogging about beer since 2007. Email: contact@boakandbailey.com

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